After more than 16 months living in Uruguay I’ve come to the conclusion that there are least four languages in which I regularly more or less communicate. These are: English, Spanish, Spanglish and Ingspañol. (There is also a fair amount of profanity which may well have reached sufficient proportions to be considered a separate language.)
You, of course, know what I mean when I mention the languages English and Spanish. You can also probably guess that Spanglish is the result of taking English words and attempted to Spanish-ize them. This impulse is fueled by the fact that there are more than 2400 English cognates in the Spanish language such as: nation-nación, car-carro, intelligent-inteligente, or president-presidente, just to name a few.
This makes it easy to try to translate words like box into el boxo, instead of caja. or la baga instead of bolsa…the combinations are endless and often humorous—especially the false cognates, of which embarazada is my favorite. Embarazada does NOT mean embarrassed, it means pregnant: so when one of our friends told everyone she was embarazada by President Bush, more than a few eyebrows were raised…
I thought that making words that were half-Spanish/half-English was simply an “ignorant extranjero” phenomenon. Eventually, my Spanish became good enough to recognize Ingspañol: which is simply the converse of Spanglish, when a Spanish-speaker takes Spanish words and attempts to anglicize them. I first recognized this phenomenon in a letter from one of our attorneys. In it he said he had enclosed a copy of a law in English, which he wrote they had “traduced” themselves—they were taking the Spanish verb traducir, which means to translate, and anglicizing it into “traduced”. Since that time, especially as my Spanish continues to improve, I have encountered many more instances of Ingspañol, especially when making diminutives. Uruguayos will add “ito or ita” to anything: a little refrigerator, for example, can be a refrigerito, and a tiny bonsai can be rendered bonsai-ita.
The Spanglish-Ingspañol dialect comes into its own on Thursday nights when we host an open house for immigrants and Uruguayos to get to know each other. As the depths of each legitimate language are probed in (sometimes) wine or beer fueled conversations, the excursions into Spanglish and Ingspañol increase. They say that languages are living and ever evolving—maybe we are witnessing an important transition without recognizing it; OR
More likely we are just having fun trying to communicate as best we can.
On a side note, and only vaguely connected to the theme of this posting, I have to relate the brief story of the most unlucky exchange student in the history of the world—I interviewed him for a job opening we had a few weeks ago.
This bright young man went to the US in a student exchange program in order to learn English.
He was placed in Southern Mississippi, near the Louisiana border—here’s the rub: he was placed in a Cajun community with a Cajun family that spoke almost NO English!
Can you imagine after a year in the US, and the only thing you learned to say was “Mon Dieu, y’all…”
My favorite example so far was a description of someone who was “tomandoing mate”.
Left by Shirley on June 26th, 2007